SRI CEO Transitions to New Role

Curtis R. Carlson is passing the CEO baton to the next generation of leaders, as he brings his innovation to a new role within SRI International.

After 16 years as president and CEO at SRI, Carlson will take over as vice chairman for innovation. In this role he will assist the research institute with business development and innovation initiatives.

Carlson holds fundamental patents in the fields of image quality, image coding and computer vision, and is a past winner of the Otto Schade Prize for contributions to imaging sciences from the Society for Information Display.

The HDTV program that became the US standard was developed by a team led by Carlson, and in 1997 they won an Emmy award for outstanding technical achievement. Siri, the virtual personal assistant acquired by Apple and widely used in its iPhone 4S and newer devices, was a spin-off venture of SRI under Carlson’s leadership, as was Redwood Robotics, later acquired by Google. He also developed the SRI Five Disciplines of Innovation.

Carlson is a fellow of the National Academy of Innovators and a member of President Obama's National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, co-chairman of the Scientific Advisory Board of the Singapore National Research Foundation.

His tenure with SRI began in 1974 with RCA Laboratories, which eventually evolved into the Sarnoff Corp., an SRI subsidiary that was fully integrated into the company in 2011. He took over as CEO of SRI in 1998.

For more information, visit: www.sri.com